SOUNDS AROUND TOWN : Getting a 2nd Wind : Dan Hicks never left; he’s just been in other towns. Now his Acoustic Warriors are doing shows and hope to make an album.

They came from another era, if not another planet.

Lanky, deadpan Dan Hicks, tongue in cheek and one foot in the music of earlier times, sang jaunty little numbers that asked questions like “Where’s the Money?” and “How Can I Miss You (When You Won’t Go Away?).” He was ever on the droll patrol, dishing out ironic lyrics by the fistful, and sometimes hiding his dazzling vocal style behind his cool, muted delivery.

While other bands around him were examining new rock ‘n’ roll formulas and psychedelia, Hicks dared to dabble in the lost art of yodeling and nodded toward such World War II-era influences as Django Reinhardt, Jimmie Rodgers, western swing and cheeky touches of jazz.

And he wasn’t alone. Hicks’ band, the Hot Licks, featured call-and-response input from a pair of female singers and some truly hot solos in the fiddle and acoustic guitar department.

In the early ‘70s, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks became an unlikely success story, with four albums out and a healthy following. This was at a time in the pop music biz when unlikely ideas stood a chance of making it.

Plenty of people recall the act fondly. I remember hearing Hicks and gang in the first rock concert I ever attended. It was in the Santa Barbara City College gymnasium, on a bill with Quicksilver Messenger Service and Goldstreet (featuring sometime Venturan Richard Torrance).

But, after 1974, the Hot Licks were gone and Hicks only cut one more album--in 1978--before he slipped out of the mainstream. Suddenly, we could miss him. He went away.

Or did he? “I haven’t done a lot on a national level,” Hicks explained. “People say, ‘Well, where have you been?’ I’ve been in different towns.”

Enter the Acoustic Warriors, a dynamic quartet that Hicks has been working with for the past five years and who will bring their act to Wheeler Hot Springs this Sunday afternoon.

Hicks, who grew up in Santa Rosa and made his splash in the San Francisco scene of the late ‘60s, now calls Mill Valley, in Marin County, home. The Bay Area, with its laid-back aura and cultural eclecticism, seems like a happy place for him.

“My stuff is still eclectic-swing, country, folk, a little Latin,” Hicks said in a phone interview from the home front. “I could say maybe I’ve got a Bay Area attitude in that I’m not real commercial-oriented. I don’t think I ever have been.

“The success I have had was just like a bonus. And I’m still playing what I want to play and sounding like I want to sound.”

That sound was vivid and sly as ever when Hicks appeared on the PBS show “Austin City Limits” in February. The show was a before-and-after affair, with a Hot Licks reunion set followed by music from the pared-down Acoustic Warriors.

What’s with the name? “To come up with a name for the backup people is tough. Sometimes I wonder if maybe it’s too much of a mouthful. Maybe it should be something short and sweet like Hot Licks.

“People like that name, but I don’t know if I could ever go back. It connotes a certain time and a certain group of people, especially girl singers, which I haven’t had since then.”

The Acoustic Warriors-- guitarist Adam Levy, violinist Brian Godchaux, and bassist Joe Pruessner--are all Hicks could ask for in a group of guys. As with the Hot Licks, musicality never gets lost in a sea of campiness.

“I’d like to think that the musicianship is right up there,” Hicks said. “I like to find people who know more than I do about actual music, about what a flatted fifth is and what to do with it.”

Fame, at least on a cult level, blew threw Hicks’ life in the ‘70s like a warm wind. He still seems to be trying to sort it all out.

“I never got rich off it or anything,” Hick recalled. “It’s hard to tell sometimes how well you’re doing yourself.

“I get people now who say, ‘Oh yeah, back in college, we played your records all the time.’ ”

Although actively pursuing a career in the live trenches, Hicks seems more than a little antsy to make his next album. In fact, he seems fit to burst. A stockpile of Hicks originals are lying in wait.

And, possibly, a more open-minded and receptive music industry is ready to embrace Hicks again. Recent releases from Leon Redbone and Taj Mahal, other specialty artists who struck big in the early ‘70s, bode well for a Hicks return to the shelves of music stores everywhere.

“It’s sort of self-defeating not to make a record,” Hicks said. “Sometimes the gigs aren’t real plentiful and sometimes they are. It would help me if I had a record. It would be in people’s living rooms. They’d say, ‘Hey, let’s go see this guy.’ ”

Hicks has gotten “nibbles” from various independent record labels, but is angling for the right deal at the right time. After periods of relative inactivity and obscurity, he seems hot on the trail of a second wind in his career.

“This is what I do for a living; I’m liking performing. I still like to get on stage. I think I’m singing better now. I like the guys who play with me. I like the sound.

“It’s a matter of keeping the thing together and trying to keep moving upward. I can say that and wonder sometimes if I do it that much. It’s time for a new level and I have to try and make that happen.”

* WHERE AND WHEN

Dan Hicks and the Acoustic Warriors, at Wheeler Hot Springs in Ojai, at 4 p.m. Sunday. For more information, call 646-8131.